Cybercrime | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Former members tied to the Black Basta ransomware operation have been observed sticking to their tried-and-tested approach of email bombing and Microsoft Teams phishing to establish persistent access to target networks. "Recently, attackers have introduced Python script execution alongside these techniques, using cURL requests to fetch and deploy malicious payloads," ReliaQuest said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The development is a sign that the threat actors are continuing to pivot and regroup, despite the Black Basta brand suffering a huge blow and a decline after the public leak of its internal chat logs earlier this February. The cybersecurity company said half of the Teams phishing attacks that were observed between February and May 2025 originated from onmicrosoft[.]com domains, and that breached domains accounted for 42% of the attacks during the same period. The latter is a lot more stealthy and allows threat actors to impersonate legitimate traffi...

INTERPOL on Wednesday announced the dismantling of more than 20,000 malicious IP addresses or domains that have been linked to 69 information-stealing malware variants. The joint action, codenamed Operation Secure , took place between January and April 2025, and involved law enforcement agencies from 26 countries to identify servers, map physical networks, and execute targeted takedowns. "These coordinated efforts resulted in the takedown of 79 percent of identified suspicious IP addresses," INTERPOL said in a statement. "Participating countries reported the seizure of 41 servers and over 100 GB of data, as well as the arrest of 32 suspects linked to illegal cyber activities." Vietnamese authorities arrested 18 suspects, and confiscated devices, SIM cards, business registration documents, and money worth $11,500. Further house raids have led to the arrest of another 12 people in Sri Lanka and two individuals in Nauru. The Hong Kong Police, per INTERPOL, iden...

The financially motivated threat actor known as FIN6 has been observed leveraging fake resumes hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to deliver a malware family called More_eggs. "By posing as job seekers and initiating conversations through platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed, the group builds rapport with recruiters before delivering phishing messages that lead to malware," the DomainTools Investigations (DTI) team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. More_eggs is the work of another cybercrime group called Golden Chickens (aka Venom Spider), which was most recently attributed to new malware families like TerraStealerV2 and TerraLogger. A JavaScript-based backdoor, it's capable of enabling credential theft, system access, and follow-on attacks, including ransomware. One of the malware's known customers is FIN6 (aka Camouflage Tempest, Gold Franklin, ITG08, Skeleton Spider, and TA4557), an e-crime crew that originally targeted point-of-s...

The threat actor known as Rare Werewolf (formerly Rare Wolf) has been linked to a series of cyber attacks targeting Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. "A distinctive feature of this threat is that the attackers favor using legitimate third-party software over developing their own malicious binaries," Kaspersky said . "The malicious functionality of the campaign described in this article is implemented through command files and PowerShell scripts." The intent of the attacks is to establish remote access to compromised hosts, and siphon credentials, and deploy the XMRig cryptocurrency miner. The activity impacted hundreds of Russian users spanning industrial enterprises and engineering schools, with a smaller number of infections also recorded in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Rare Werewolf , also known by the names Librarian Ghouls and Rezet, is the moniker assigned to an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that has a track record of...

OpenAI has revealed that it banned a set of ChatGPT accounts that were likely operated by Russian-speaking threat actors and two Chinese nation-state hacking groups to assist with malware development, social media automation, and research about U.S. satellite communications technologies, among other things. "The [Russian-speaking] actor used our models to assist with developing and refining Windows malware, debugging code across multiple languages, and setting up their command-and-control infrastructure," OpenAI said in its threat intelligence report. "The actor demonstrated knowledge of Windows internals and exhibited some operational security behaviors." The Go-based malware campaign has been codenamed ScopeCreep by the artificial intelligence (AI) company. There is no evidence that the activity was widespread in nature. The threat actor, per OpenAI, used temporary email accounts to sign up for ChatGPT, using each of the created accounts to have one conversat...

Cybersecurity researchers are alerting to a new malware campaign that employs the ClickFix social engineering tactic to trick users into downloading an information stealer malware known as Atomic macOS Stealer ( AMOS ) on Apple macOS systems. The campaign, according to CloudSEK, has been found to leverage typosquat domains mimicking U.S.-based telecom provider Spectrum. "macOS users are served a malicious shell script designed to steal system passwords and download an AMOS variant for further exploitation," security researcher Koushik Pal said in a report published this week. "The script uses native macOS commands to harvest credentials, bypass security mechanisms, and execute malicious binaries." It's believed that the activity is the work of Russian-speaking cybercriminals owing to the presence of Russian language comments in the malware's source code. The starting point of the attack is a web page that impersonates Spectrum ("panel-spectrum[....

India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has revealed that it has arrested six individuals and dismantled two illegal call centers that were found to be engaging in a sophisticated transnational tech support scam targeting Japanese citizens. The law enforcement agency said it conducted coordinated searches at 19 locations across Delhi, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh on May 28, 2025, as part of an initiative called Operation Chakra V, which aims to combat cyber-enabled financial crimes. The cybercrime syndicates, per the CBI, defrauded foreign nationals, mainly Japanese citizens, by masquerading as technical support personnel from various multinational corporations, including Microsoft.  "The syndicate operated call centers designed to appear as legitimate customer service centers, through which victims were deceived into believing that their electronic devices were compromised," the agency said . "Under this pretext, victims were coerced into transferring funds ...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the seizure of cryptocurrency funds and about 145 clearnet and dark web domains associated with an illicit carding marketplace called BidenCash. "The operators of the BidenCash marketplace use the platform to simplify the process of buying and selling stolen credit cards and associated personal information," the DoJ said . "BidenCash administrators charged a fee for every transaction conducted on the website." BidenCash launched in March 2022 to fill the void left by the shutdown of Joker's Stash a year earlier and several other carding forums like UniCC . Since the time it went operational, the illegal bazaar ("bidencash[.]asia," "bidencash[.]bd," and "bidencash[.]ws") is estimated to have supported more than 117,000 customers, facilitated the trafficking of over 15 million payment card numbers and personally identifiable information, and generated no less than $17 mi...

The U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has levied sanctions against a Philippines-based company named Funnull Technology Inc. and its administrator Liu Lizhi for providing infrastructure to conduct romance baiting scams that led to massive cryptocurrency losses. The Treasury accused the Taguig-headquartered company of enabling thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams that caused Americans to lose billions of dollars annually. "Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses," the agency said in a press release. The average loss is estimated to be over $150,000 per individual. Funnull, also called Fang Neng CDN (funnull[.]io, funnull[.]com, funnull[.]app, and funnull[.]buzz), first attracted the attention of the cybersecurity community in June 2024 after it was implicated in the supply chain attack of the widely-used Polyfill[.]io J...

Fake installers for popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools like OpenAI ChatGPT and InVideo AI are being used as lures to propagate various threats, such as the CyberLock and Lucky_Gh0$t ransomware families, and a new malware dubbed Numero. "CyberLock ransomware, developed using PowerShell, primarily focuses on encrypting specific files on the victim's system," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said in a report published today. "Lucky_Gh0$t ransomware is yet another variant of the Yashma ransomware, which is the sixth iteration of the Chaos ransomware series, featuring only minor modifications to the ransomware binary." Numero, on the other hand, is a destructive malware that impacts victims by manipulating the graphical user interface (GUI) components of their Windows operating system, thereby rendering the machines unusable. The cybersecurity company said the legitimate versions of the AI tools are popular in the business-to-business (B2B) sal...

A sprawling operation undertaken by global law enforcement agencies and a consortium of private sector firms has disrupted the online infrastructure associated with a commodity information stealer known as Lumma (aka LummaC or LummaC2), seizing 2,300 domains that acted as the command-and-control (C2) backbone to commandeer infected Windows systems. "Malware like LummaC2 is deployed to steal sensitive information such as user login credentials from millions of victims in order to facilitate a host of crimes, including fraudulent bank transfers and cryptocurrency theft," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement. The confiscated infrastructure has been used to target millions across the world through affiliates and other cyber criminals. Lumma Stealer, active since late 2022, is estimated to have been used in at least 1.7 million instances to steal information, such as browser data, autofill information, login credentials, and cryptocurrency seed phrases. Th...

A Chinese-language, Telegram-based marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee has facilitated no less than $8.4 billion in transactions since 2022, making it the second major black market to be exposed after HuiOne Guarantee . According to a report published by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, merchants on the marketplace have been found to peddle technology, personal data, and money laundering services. "The USDT stablecoin is the primary payment method, with the market having received $8.4 billion in transactions to date," the company said . "Some transactions can be linked to funds stolen by North Korea." Xinbi, like HuiOne, has offered its services to scammers in Southeast Asia, including those responsible for so-called romance baiting schemes (formerly referred to as "pig butchering"), which has become one of the most lucrative forms of cybercrime in recent years. What's notable about these criminal bazaars is that they are entirely run on Tele...